July, 2008

Here is a brief look at the Badaboom feature set and supported formats. Hopefully, this helps to answer some of the questions about what will be supported and when the product will be available.

Both products support very similar functions with the “Pro” version allowing you to open the hood and fine tune the transcoding while the basic version is designed for ease of use. In both cases the products only support transcoding and do not support editing, cutting, splicing, etc…

Badaboom™

Elemental Technologies’ Badaboom™ Media Converter takes a fundamentally different approach to video format conversion from other solutions. Instead of performing format conversion on the CPU, it harnesses massively parallel GPUs from NVIDIA. By using the power of the GPU, the time required for video conversion is reduced. As an added bonus, you can still use the CPU for normal everyday tasks such as email and internet browsing. Anyone can now painlessly convert video between formats, leaving more time to enjoy the video and eliminating the frustration of video conversion delays. The Badaboom™ Media Converter provides a simple to use tool for standard definition media conversion.

Elemental Technologies’ Badaboom™ Pro Media Converter takes a fundamentally different approach to video format conversion from other solutions. Instead of performing format conversion on the CPU, it harnesses massively parallel GPUs from NVIDIA. By using the power of the GPU, the time required for video conversion is reduced. As an added bonus, you can still use the CPU for normal everyday tasks such as email and internet browsing. Anyone can now painlessly convert video between formats including AVCHD, leaving more time to enjoy the video and eliminating the frustration of video conversion delays. The Badaboom™ Pro Media Converter allows full customization of the conversion process and is designed for advanced users or users converting HD content.

We tested the GPU processing by converting a video for the iPhone first with Sony Vegas 8.0, and then with the BadaBOOM GPU-based converter supplied by nVidia. On a quad-core, 3.2Ghz Core 2 Extreme QX9770, our sample MPEG2 video took 42 seconds to convert to iPhone H.264 format using the CPU and Vegas 8.0. Using a preliminary version of BadaBOOM to convert the file using the GPU, the same file converted in just 27 seconds. The difference will be even more dramatic on slower CPUs or processors with fewer cores, where the CPU conversion will take much longer-but the GPU version should remain around 27 seconds. (BadaBOOM should be commercially available in August.)

June 18th from tgdaily an editors opinion column discussing GPU vs. CPU performance here are a couple of quotes:

But both the creation and sharing of video and its transmission over existing networks require a lot of real-time video compression, which comes down to the real-time transcoding of high definition video into more compressed video types. Even if you are running one program at a time Nvidia told me that a video that typically might take 2.5 hours to transcode, may only take a little over 30 minutes with their fastest cards. I’m dying to see if thats true, but even a 50% improvement would be worth the trouble in my opinion.

I am looking forward to the improvements in transcoding because I’m constantly putting videos on my Zune for trips and I would love to be able to do that much more quickly given the fact that I typically wait until the last moment to remember to do this.

Thanks to NVIDIA’s new CUDA software, a range of applications are soon going to be tapping into the specialised processing abilities of NVIDIA’s cards in ways that will make your CPU seem positively pathetic. iPod users will appreciate Elemental Technologies’ BadaBOOM Media Converter. Due in August, it allows video transcoding via the GPU which is eighteen times faster than today’s CPU based method.

With the recent unveiling of the alpha release of the Badaboom software in conjunction with the NVIDIA GTX 260 and GTX 280 graphics cards the word is getting out on the performance gains seen with Badaboom…

The question, as usual, comes down to the software. Nvidia provided us with a prerelease beta of a video transcoding application called BadaBoom, from a developer called Elemental. BadaBoom uses the GTX280 to transform a video file from one format to another, and the results are very fast, much faster than if you ran the same operation on a CPU-based algorithm. Adobe has said that the next version of its Creative Suite will support GPU-based processing

BadaBOOM converts a media file (audio, video) an order of magnitude faster than a CPU-driven converter. We have seen it convert to H.264 at about 120 frames per seconds using a good to very good quality settings. Anyone who has compressed video files knows that this is uber-fast!

On a quad-core, 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX970, our sample MPEG2 video took 42 seconds to convert to iPhone H.264 format using the CPU and Vegas 8.0. Using a preliminary version of BadaBOOM to convert the file using the GPU, the same file converted in just 27 seconds. The difference will be even more dramatic on slower CPUs or processors with fewer cores, where the CPU conversion will take much longer-but the GPU version should remain around 27 seconds. (BadaBOOM should be commercially available in August.)

With the preview version, unfortunately compatible only with the GT 200, we were able to compress our test video (400MB) in iPhone format (640*365) at maximum quality in 56.5 seconds on the GTX 260 and 49 seconds on the GTX 280 (15% faster). For comparison purposes, the iTunes H.264 encoder took eight minutes using the CPU…

Initial tests in our labs could verify the claim: a two-minute clip optimized for the iPod Touch (480 by 320-pixel resolution, AAC audio) took about 24 seconds. That same video, compressed using AVS Video converter 5.5, took 56 seconds. That’s impressive, no doubt, but it really is an apples-to-oranges comparison. You see, for the fairest test, we’d need to have the provided BadaBOOM software(which, by the way, works amazing well) have a toggle to switch between GPU encoding and CPU encoding.

A firm called Elemental is preparing several video encoding products that use GPU acceleration, including a plug-in for Adobe Premiere and a stand-alone transcoder called BadaBoom. The company showed a demonstration of a very, very quick transcode and claimed BadaBoom could convert an MPEG2 file to H.264 at a rate faster than real-time playback-a huge improvement over CPU-based encoding

BadaBoom was able to transcode the source file at an average of 154 fps. Handbrake on the other hand was hitting around 32 fps. BadaBoom completed in 28 seconds while Handbrake finished its job in 2 minutes and 20 seconds. The resulting files were nearly identical in quality and bit-rate, but the GPU accelerated client was almost 5 times faster than the already quick Handbrake program running on a C2D X6800 processor.

The Badaboom Media Converter. The first GPU-accelerated video tool that converts media between different formats fast. And furiously. No more kicking off a conversion for your iPod and then waiting until the next morning for it to be ready. No more frustration when it’s time to take that HD video of your new baby and upload it to YouTube or Facebook. In the very near future, vaporware will become waterware and the world will rejoice. To keep up with all the latest news, please sign up for the mailing list (we promise not to abuse the privilege of storing your email address).